


And Thereby Hangs

by irrelevant



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Cats, Crack, Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-10
Updated: 2010-07-10
Packaged: 2017-10-10 11:54:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/99488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irrelevant/pseuds/irrelevant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Things are Learned, Spock and Bones are themselves, and Kirk Doesn't Laugh.  At all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Thereby Hangs

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Сказ о котах и хвостах](https://archiveofourown.org/works/584826) by [Tenar30](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tenar30/pseuds/Tenar30)



> I totally blame this fic on ST:TAS. *facepalm*

Lo Sseylt said the effects would wear off in a day, and since the metaphysical world is her territory I guess I'll take her word for it. This is her show—she would know.

No, I take that back. Not the knowing because I'm sure she does. But it's not her fault that Bones and Spock sometimes don't know when to keep their mouths closed. One of them sees an opening and jumps all over it, and then the other jumps all over the jumping. One minute I was standing in the middle of an impressive, ancient, alien temple, surrounded by multicolored cat things. Then Bones said something about the resemblance between Spock's ears and the cat things' ears.

Minus the fur, of course.

Spock being Spock, he remarked right back at Bones. Something about rounds and points and their respective correlations to dull and sharp, and well, Bones didn't take that sitting down. He got right up in Spock's face. I was just starting to consider putting a stop to things before they got out of hand when Lo Sseylt—whose temper is apparently as short and red Irish as her hair—got a _look_ on her face. Before I could even open my mouth there were two more cat things on the temple floor than there had been when I walked in.

Spock was green and blue. Bones was…pink. I was as close to mania as a starship captain could get while retaining his command. I turned to Lo Sseylt, my arms spread wide in a wordless question and she stared back at me—an impressively forbidding stare for a five-foot-nothing woman wearing what amounted to a t-shirt and jeans.

"It is a Learning," she told me, and there was an entire star system's worth of _idiot offworlders_ in there.

"Is it—" I glanced down at my officers. Spock was doing his best imitation of an ancient Egyptian statue. Bones was trying to eat his tail. Or maybe he was trying to lick it, not that that was any better but—oh god. Bones. Tail. I could've gone my entire life without putting those two words into this context. "Is this learning…permanent?"

_No, tell me no, please…_

"Yes."

Starship captains don't lose it, have I mentioned that? They don't whimper, either. Not and maintain their crew's respect. Damn it.

Looking too serene for a woman who'd just turned two men into felines, Lo Sseylt said: "All Learning, if truly learned, is forever. The shape of the Learning will fade. When this sun completes itself, what was will be again."

I like women. Very much so. I was starting to dislike this one a lot. "In time, you will understand," she said, and smiled at me.

It's the smile every priestess ever born masters: mystically benevolent Mother of All, and condescending as hell. That female Bones was so over the moon about, the one on that flying rock—what was her name? Pretty girl but very…dominant. Not really my style. She had the best priestess smile I've ever seen, but Lo Sseylt's was no slouch.

"Thank you for your assistance, ma'am. I think we'll be leaving now," I said. I was pulling my communicator out as I spoke, "You're sure the physical—manifestations—will reverse? By the end of one of your days?"

"As the Lady wills." She was watching Spock and Bones, not me, and there was a strange smile on her face. Not the priestess smile now, this was something else. I didn't trust it.

"Kirk to Enterprise," I said into the communicator, and Sulu's voice came back to me in response: "Sulu here, Captain."

I crouched down and held my hand out to Bones. He came over immediately, sniffed at the tips of my fingers then butted his head against my knee. "One to beam up, Mr. Sulu. Inform Mr. Kyle."

"Sir." Sulu sounded worried. "Are the doctor and Mr. Spock all right?"

"They're fine," I said. Bones stopped sniffing my uniform pants and started to climb me. "Or they will be. Relay to transporter two, Mr. Sulu. That's an order."

"Aye-aye, sir," Sulu said, and now he just sounded amused. Bones had reached my right shoulder and was crawling across my back to my left; he hung his front legs down over my chest and dug his hind claws into my uniform shirt. My back was going to look like I'd had a run-in with a Sumarthin benghatti.

Unlike Bones, Spock was sitting very still, watching me. I tried holding my hand out to him as I did for Bones but he just blinked at me. By then the transporter effect was buzzing my ears and making my skin twitch. "Time to go, Mr. Spock," I told him. He blinked at me again, and just when I thought I was going to have to grab him he jumped straight at me. I wasn't expecting him and my field was clumsy. The beam had us and I had Spock, but I was already falling and I finished falling on the transporter platform, landing hard and flat on my back with Spock in my arms and Bones wrapped around my neck, howling in my ear. Somehow I wasn't surprised to see Sulu and Scotty standing behind the transporter console. If the chief engineer wants to work the transporter himself, who's going to tell him no? Besides me, I mean.

Sulu must have ratted me out to Scotty; he's got the biggest mouth on the ship. You'd think the senior communications officer would be notorious for gossip but Uhura gives Aldebaran shellmouths a run for their money in the tight lips department. Sulu, on the other hand, can't seem to keep his shut. Seeing me and Spock and Bones in a heap on the platform wasn't helping matters; his jaw was somewhere around his knees, and Scotty's wasn't in much better condition.

"Will someone please," I said as Bones finally pulled his claws out of my back and shoulders, "get these two off of me?"

Spock looked at me with affronted dignity and sat firmly down on my abdomen. "I'll call Nurse Chapel," Sulu said. I guess he'd finally got his jaw working again.

"You do that," I said. I dropped my head back down on the platform and Bones picked that moment to launch himself off my chest at the open door.

With a pair of yells that almost matched Bones' yowl, Scotty and Sulu dove after him. Spock and I stayed where we were and watched the show. "You sure you don't want to join in?" I asked Spock. He gave me another of those looks, and then he very deliberately stood up, turned around, and sat back down. I contemplated his tail. It was a nice tail, as tails go. Blue. Fluffy. I rested my arm over my eyes and waited for Chapel to come deliver me from all of this. And I imagined that if I listened hard enough I would hear Lo Sseylt, down on her planet, serene in her temple. Laughing at me.

That was mid alpha shift. It's now approaching the end of beta and I'm thinking of going back on duty because if I have to sit here in my quarters trying to keep my two closest friends from killing each other much longer, I may just let them.

I tried giving them to Chapel when she showed up at the transporter room, and she did take them. She called me down to sickbay half an hour later. Bones had somehow retrieved his twentieth century stethoscope from the wall display in his office. He'd dragged it under his chair and was refusing to come out. Spock was sitting on a junior nurse's work station, staring fixedly at the poor girl. "They're scaring people, sir," Chapel told me. "I wish I could keep them here, but—"

Yes, but. Sickbay needs to be accessible to those who are not well. A sickbay whose CMO is under his chair growling and chewing on his medical paraphernalia is not what I'd call a healing environment.

After removing Spock and Bones to my quarters I stopped by the botany lab and asked if it would be possible to let a pair of very small, harmless animals loose in the Terrarium for a while. The Terrarium is what most of us call the simulated biosphere where the botany and biology departments host their larger experiments. My request generated a few panicky looks and a barrage of incomprehensible—to me, I assume it made perfect sense to them—terminology. The gist of all the terminology, I gathered, was no. So I turned to my last, best hope.

I have great respect for Lt. Moreau. I do. When I said I thought we could be friends I wasn't kidding; I admire the hell out of the woman. She's got guts, in this or any other universe. But apparently even her brass has its limits, including not opening her chem department's stasis room up to a pair of alien felines. Another unequivocal no. I asked her, "Are you using it?"

"Sir, do you have any idea how hard it is to get rid of cat hair?"

"So decontaminate," I suggested. "That's what Spock does." She folded her arms and narrowed her eyes at me. "Fine," I said, already backing my way out. "I could make it an order, you know," I added. But then Spock would probably stop talking to me for a month. He says he doesn't want command but the minute I start infringing on his scientific territory he gets in a galaxy class snit.

"Captain."

I turned at the door to look back at Moreau. "Yes, Lieutenant?"

"What are you doing for litter?" she asked, and I realized that things could get a lot worse than they already were.

In the end, I gave in and called Landon. She's usually good with crises that derail higher-ranking officers, and she didn't disappoint. She got a box from stores, some kind of absorbent crystals from Moreau, and since she was off duty she offered to take charge of Spock and Bones until alpha shift was over. I thanked her and got out of there as fast as I politely could. It was well into beta shift, almost 2100 hours before I came back and relieved her; after I straightened things out with her immediate superior, she took off without a backward glance. I've been here since then. Waiting for my friends to become my friends again.

I should probably sleep but I don't think I could if I tried. Anyway, Spock's sitting on my bunk. And it's not as though I don't have anything to do. Like any commander, I have a backlog of paperwork I could and should be taking care of, and I'm trying. But it's hard to concentrate when out of the corner of your eye you can see your CMO wriggling along, belly to the deck, stalking your XO's tail.

Spock is sitting on the edge of my bunk, tucked up in the classic feline position that's always reminded me of a bread loaf. Bones is on the deck, flatter than a—one of those flat things from Deneva. They've played this scenario out at least twenty times over the last three hours. This is how it goes: Bones starts out over by the head door. He flattens himself down until he really does remind me of one of those brain cell creatures. Spock doesn't do anything that I can see—he just sits on the extreme edge of the bunk. With—and this is the important part—his tail hanging off the edge.

So you've got Spock on the edge of the bunk and Bones wiggling towards him across the deck. You would not believe how long it takes Bones to get over there. Sometimes he'll stop, for no apparent reason. Then Spock will twitch his tail, just slightly, and Bones will make a kind of low, grating noise in his throat and start crawling again. When he does get over to the bunk, he doesn't do anything but sit there under Spock's tail. Just…watching it twitch.

The first time I watched them do this, by the time Bones got to the bunk I felt like yelling, "If you're going to bite it then for god's sake bite it!" I managed to restrain myself. A few minutes later I was glad I had. You have to keep watching. If you don't you'll miss the moment when Spock whips his tail up and away from Bones. You'll miss Bones leaping after it.

It always ends the same way. Before Bones even lands on the bunk, Spock's tail is tucked up against his side; he puts his paw over the tip so it can't twitch. And then Bones lands on a space that's empty of tail and glares at Spock. Only for a few seconds, though, before he settles himself in the Egyptian statue position, licks his paw a few times, then stands and jumps off the side of the bunk opposite the one Spock is sitting on. He paces back over to the head door and sits down in the same bread loaf position as Spock's.

Five, maybe ten minutes later—I'm not positive exactly how long—Spock drops his tail back down over the side of the bunk. And the process renews itself, repeats itself, until we're back around to now, with Bones sitting under Spock's tail.

I give up on my paperwork; paperwork is not going to happen this shift. "Computer, end session," I say. I listen to the computer power itself down, I pull my chair out as quietly as I can, and when I have it placed where my view isn't hindered by the partition anymore, I sit back down and watch.

The tail-whip happens, as it has every time before. This time, though, things shake out differently. Instead of pouncing on Spock's tail, Bones jumps him. Spock does something, I'm not sure what, but Bones goes head over hind feet over Spock's back onto the bunk and lies there on his back with all four legs in the air. I almost expect Spock to get down and find somewhere else to sit. Instead, he flicks his tail out towards Bones. Bones rolls over on his side and attacks.

The mode of battle is…not what I expect. Spock is still sitting as he's been sitting for the last three hours, his tail is the only thing moving. He's not even looking at Bones, but he seems to know when Bones is about to catch his tail and he almost always manages to get it out of Bones' reach. The few times that Bones does catch Spock's tail, he lets it go immediately. And that's when I realize they're not fighting or trying to annoy each other. They're playing. Spock and Bones. Playing. And I just realized something else. Something I should have realized a long time ago. What they're doing right now is the feline version of what they do every day as humans. I'm beginning to think Lo Sseylt's Learning was less for Bones and Spock than for me.

I need my first officer and chief medical officer back. More, I need my friends back. But not so desperately that I can begrudge them this one strange day of shore leave. Spock doesn't take leave often enough to satisfy either Bones or myself; I think Bones would agree that this could very well be the best way to give him some down time. Then there's Bones himself. He passes up leave as often as I do, which is about three-quarters of the time. This is good for both of them.

I look back at the bunk. They've stopped moving, for the most part. Bones makes one last half-hearted bat at Spock's tail and then he relaxes, curling in on himself, curving himself towards Spock. At first, Spock doesn't do anything. Bones' breathing slows, evens into sleep. Slowly, Spock eases himself closer to Bones. His chin rests just shy of Bones' paw. He curves his belly to fit the curve of Bones' body. They're a pair of hooked-together commas, interlocked like they were built to do exactly this, and for a second—just one—I want to be over there with them. What color would—no. No, I don't want to know. But I think that down in her temple, Lo Sseylt is smiling.

There's no real reason for me to stay, Bones and Spock don't need me here. The beta shift bridge crew should be about to change places with gamma shift. Right now—whenever right now happens to be—is always the best time for a surprise inspection. I stand up. "Lights, one-quarter." And I walk as silently as I can to the door. It slides open; I turn my head just before I step through and look back at my friends, a pile of furry sleep on the bunk. Bones is sucking on Spock's ear. Oh _god_. I snap my head around so fast it feels like whiplash, and leave before I start laughing. If I start, I have this feeling I won't stop, and with both Spock and Bones out of commission that could be bad. As it is, I get strange looks from the crewmembers I pass on the way to the lift. I'm glad when the doors finally close behind me, no other passengers, and I can stop worrying about my command image.

The lift hums around me, beneath my feet. Briefly, I picture Bones and Spock on my bunk; if Lo Sseylt wasn't fibbing they should be changing back soon. It occurs to me that I should have put them in their separate quarters before I left. If they go back to normal as they are now—damn. I didn't even ask if their clothes will survive the transition. I should reverse the lift, go back to deck five and fix this. I open my mouth to tell the computer to take me back... and then I close it. I'm not going back, not now anyway. Not the nicest thing I've ever done, but I'm not really that nice a guy. My only regret is that I'm probably going to miss seeing the proverbial fur fly.

Wait a minute.

I pause the lift and thumb the intercom on. "Kirk to security. Mr. Giotto, respond."

"Giotto here," says my security chief. I smile even though he can't see me.

"Activate video surveillance in my quarters, would you? Access restricted to myself, of course."

He wants to ask me but he won't. He's too good at his job. "Aye-aye, sir," he says, and I think I hear a smile in his voice.

"Thanks Greg," I say, my own smile widening to a grin. "Kirk out."

Live and learn.


End file.
